


The Hitch's Guide to the Patriarchy

by dollarpound



Category: Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 23:21:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10056668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound
Summary: Sometime during Nanarchy, Lister comes out as bi to his parents.  Meanwhile, Kochanski has designs on the Cat and Kryten meets a mysterious stranger...





	

A sense of closure was starting to gather around Lister. He was trying to explain it to Kochanski as they sat in the buggy, a cosy bubble in a vicious sandstorm that tore across the surface of the planetoid they were inspecting.

‘You know how, when you get to the end of a week or a year or a month, you feel tired, even though in a way you’ve always just finished living for another year or month or week or whatever all the time every second?’

‘Maybe it’s like vertigo: don’t look down and you’re ok. But a marker like a Birthday or a New Year is like looking down... all of a sudden you’re tired for the whole time since you last thought about it.’

‘Exactly, so you get it...’

‘No. What’s the special occasion?’

‘All the adventures we’ve been through... it feels like one of those times when life is tidying itself up, scores are being settled, loose ends are being, er, tightened? Smeg it. We’ve returned to the same point when everything went weird. The Despair Squid Sector. The last time everything was relatively normal. I’m about to get my arm back, all going well, and hopefully the Dwarf n’all. And it feels like we’re all getting on better. Like hopefully Kryten’s settled down with the old misogynism, you seem to be getting on well with the Cat...’

‘Cat’s cool actually... I’ve been a bit harsh on him sometimes... And how are you processing the whole Rimmer thing? Back in the ducts, I was teasing, I was just keeping your mind off the claustrophobia... I know it must be quite traumatising having desires that don’t square with your sexual identity all of a sudden...’

‘Uh?’

‘Your reaction, when I said my Dave was gay, was really strong. You couldn’t even conceive of yourself as gay in an alternative dimension. Of all the mind blowing experiences you’ve had – the interspecies marriage, giving birth to twins, the whole oedipal time loop thing we’ve discovered we’re circumambulating, backwards orgasms, meeting a female version of yourself, an evil sadist version of yourself, a fascist future version of yourself – all this and what really freaks you out is the idea of being gay - *even in an alternative dimension*.’

‘It doesn’t freak me out,’ Lister said nonchalantly.

‘You said there’s *no way* you could be gay. Like that, you said it like that, *no way*...’

‘Well there is no way...’

‘Why no way?’

‘It’s hard to describe... it’s... I mean... look... okay... so... once... I went into a wine bar...’

‘And?’

‘Exactly! No big deal to you is it? I bet you pop into wine bars like there’s no tomorrow... probably you don’t even notice it sometimes like when you spill shirt on your soup and don’t notice, or like wine, when you spill wine in your soup and mop it up with your shirt and don’t even notice you noticed...’

‘Dave, are you alright?’

‘Of course!’

‘What’s the big deal about going into a wine bar?’

‘You’ve just proved my point: there is no big deal about going into a wine bar, it’s like being gay isn’t it?’ Kochanski paused and thought for a minute. Was Dave alright? What was he on about?

‘Sure. No big deal...’

‘In your world. But you were raised in a computer generated simulation of a boarding school. Whatever the prevailing ideology is they can just set the parameters so you all get turned out having the perfect attitudes to race, gender, class, sexuality, so you’re not held back by any issues in your seamless careerism...’ 

Kochanski boiled over – it was like when Kryten made some casually sexist simile... ‘How dare you! Do you know how hard you have to work to become a Navigation Officer? You have no idea! Of course they optimise the settings according to career success, but that only makes things harder, more competitive... it might be a virtual education but there’s a limited pool of real jobs waiting for you in the real world when you graduate...’

‘Alright, alright, I’m not trying to take your achievements away from you..’

‘It sounds like you are.’ Lister sighed and the sand sighed and rattled the roof grittily. Kochanski exhaled and the wind blew and smoothed the mood in the bug.

‘Alls I meant is... I’m a street kid innit? Growing up in that kind of setting, people aren’t homophobic exactly, there’s just a more traditional way of behaving. In tight communities, communities that are forced to be tight in a way, due to crowding, due to people being in the same circumstances, due to people sharing more, spending more time with their families... running in gangs... and you know there was this backlash against the left and identity politics in the working classes... 

‘I was just trying to point out that this doesn’t get through to the algorithms in your cyber school because it’s a career advantage to be ignorant of this stuff... the way that identities aren’t just some off the peg whim like they are for you liberal elites... but... but... there are real antagonisms and histories to these struggles that play out in dole ques and betting shops and pubs and post offices all the time and it affects you and conditions you, it means that some options are kind of closed off to you because you can’t search your soul, or express yourself, because it’s a hard-knock life and you have to tow the line...’

Kochanksi felt guilty about how she had this running joke with her girlfriends about Dave being her ‘bit of rough’ and the implied connotation that the working classes were this source of virility and manliness to be tapped and supplement the sex drives of elites like her. Some va-vavoom for the anaemic, increasingly hologramatic, elite. It didn’t matter how knowingly they made these jokes, she now felt, it was kind of gross. Was she on the one hand teasing him for being such a heteroboy, but on the other exploiting it?

Lister felt bad about digging into his transdimensional-ex’s class identity, too. Airing these issues always left a squicky smeggy feeling in your gut like unspiced food. He used to joke with Petersen and the boys that she was his ‘bit of posh’ – she represented to him something more calm and still and that had to come from a different world for him, a different world than the dystopian retropunk frenzy of 22nd Liverpool, something he saw in those pinball eyes, that spoke of an tropical idyll (an idyll is the idea of everything just being the same forever but somehow in a nice way, a really nice idyllic way, with extra mango juice). This crazy plan was the only thing in his lazy space-bum life that involved any will of his own – the rest was just a case of passively bouncing round like a pinball. 

Yet Kochanski had worked hard every step of the way. When she took shore leave, or had a robot goldfish pedicure, or took a retropunk sabbatical, the degree to which she let her hair down was always carefully calibrated to optimise productivity just the same way that when Rimmer tried to revise without sleep or food for days on end he would lose it and pass out the poor sod. The point was, it was Lister who’d had everything handed to him on a backwards timetravelling silver spoon and Kochanski who’s had to work for her class.

‘What about Bent Bob?’ she asked suddenly, flinching homophobia-phobicly.

‘Like I said, we’ve got a different way of dealing with things in the cheap seats. Know this though: Bob was our mate, we loved him, we were just boys busting each other’s balls...’ Lister felt nostalgic.

‘But he was gay and working class, so you’re probably just not gay.’

‘I know I’m not gay! It’s not like I think all gay people are like Oscar Wilde or D H Lawrence or something. I’m just *saying*... look... I’m the last human alive in this Universe, dimension whatever... so aren’t all these *labels*... gay, hetero, working class, elite... kind of relative to the societies they structure which are... all dead... I just so happen to be in love with my old frenemy Arnold Rimmer... he has a sex and a class and a sexuality... but they don’t mean much in themselves in the maelstrom of dimensions he must be whirling around in right now... and they don’t amount to a hill of beans in this post-apocalyptic setting... so let’s just let them go, no?

‘But I’ve been saying that for aeons, anyway. Even back in the radical sham glam squats of 22nd century Liverpool, after I dropped out of art college, everyone was bi, it was just assumed, part of the resistance to crypto-fascist monosexism... and I kept that with me, I’m surprised you didn’t know...’

‘So you’re not straight?’

‘When did I ever say that?’

cCO

The Cat was patiently sucking away the fine dust he was absolutely covered in with a minute vacuum cleaner he kept sealed in a zip-lock bag for such occasions. In this self-sufficient sensible, practical manner, he was much like Duane Dibbley, the smeghead side of the coin that was the flipside to Cat’s cool tail. 

Really this whole mess was Duane Dibbley’s fault in a way, Cat reflected, as he famously liked his reflections, because the hallucinations distracted them from the Dwarf long enough to lose it for 200 years only to arrive here - this God forsaken, inside-of-a-dust-bag, static ball of dandruff that was supposedly his birthplace in the exact spot he thought he was Duane and wanted to shoot himself in the head with a harpoon gun! 

It meant a lot to Cat – he was the only one of them actually born on the ship, and his people also came from the ship. Damn that Duane, he said as he sucked the last few crumbs of what was allegedly Red Dwarf from his crotch.

‘What?’ said Lister.

‘Nothing...’ said Cat, not realising he had said it out loud.

‘I wonder, if it *is* Red Dwarf.. what that bit there is...’ said Lister, pointing at Cat’s bulge. Cat looked at him reprovingly as he continued to clean his velvet swaddled package. ‘Maybe *that* bit there is like, I don’t know, a vending machine nozzle or what?’

‘Do you mind?’ said Cat as he turned off the noisy device. They sat in silence for a while like old friends could and listened to the breeze instead of shooting it.

‘I feel like it’s the end, you know?’

‘You’re telling me! First you’re born with only two nipples, now you only got one arm...’

‘No I mean, things are wrapping up somehow..’

‘You think Officer BB’s going home?’

‘Maybe. Maybe the nanobots can build like a portal or something. Maybe I can get me arm back...’

‘...Get your Arn back?’

‘No, get me *arm* back...’

‘I was saying what you were thinking not what you were saying, Bud.’

There was a pause and then they both laughed, Cat grabbing Lister’s thigh and shaking it. They sobered up as the storm around them grew in its intensity. ‘Cat...’ said Lister finally.

‘Yeah?’ said Cat, hesitantly.

‘What do you think happens to you when you die?’

‘Phew! For a minute there Bud I thought you were going for one of those really deep questions... you know like about Wilma Flintstone...’

Lister secretly gave him a you’re crazy look for no one to see. ‘See I think it’s like a loop you know... like there’s no end, there’s no after, it’s just infinitely deep and rich and folds round on itself again and again, like all these dimensions we keep going into and stuff...’

‘Yeah, but it has to end *sometime*...’

‘I feel like it’s all just a hall of mirrors and I’m always just here in some smegged up situation just trying to have a good attitude and be as lazy as I can when the weird smeg stops, that’s my strategy.’

‘Yeah, but you’re space crazy.’

‘You’re right. Me brains Talkie Toasted from all the freaky fungus before we even had the accident to be honest.’

‘My God is a space shroom causality.’

‘Look you don’t believe in all that religion smeg do you?’

‘I believe, in some way, that when I die, I will be reincarnated another eight times before meeting 70 Virgos in a vat of banana yoghurt...’

‘Virgos? Don’t you mean virgins?’

‘Virgins? That’s creepy!’

‘Why Virgos?’

‘It’s a Cat thing. Because we’re a species originating in space, we have a special system for predicting the future by reading the stars... We call it... horoscopes...’

‘Yeah, we have that too..’ said Lister listlessly.

‘You have that too?’ said the Cat becoming correspondingly more energised. ‘They call it horo-scope, right, because of scope, looking, right, like microscope, and horo, because it’s what happens tom-horo...’

‘Tom-horo?’ said Lister horo-fiedly.

‘Tom-horo! Horo-scope, see?’

‘Right. Fine,’ said Lister, sleepily.

Suddenly a stranger appeared behind them. He was a middle aged white guy, with almost long, lank blonde hair, langoring over a charmingly cheeky and intriguing face, langouring over a tumbler of whiskey with a block of ice that filled the whole buggy with its arresting aroma.

‘Excuse me Gentleman, terribly sorry, terribly sorry to arrive unannounced, I couldn’t help wondering, Mr Cat is it? I’m here on a mission for a secret global security agency assessing the future of religious conflict and I actually want to do a very fine grained analyses, rather less fine one would hope than the strange little particles your good ship has been reduced to and that now fill my suit pocket and have infiltrated by Scotch... Mm! Excuse me...’ he lifted a finger of his little Trump hand as if he intended to continue rambling while he lifted the Scotch to his lips, imbibing just a trace of the small rouge one with it. He practically choked when Lister interjected before he had a chance to continue his thesis.

‘Excuse you? Excuse me! Who the smeg are yeh for starters? I thought I was the last human alive till I met you. What are you doing here anyway?’

‘I told you, I’m working for a secret global agency...’ He repeated the words slowly as if really put out and as his face reddened slightly from the Scotch and the exertion of making himself felt to these space-bum-numb-skulls Lister felt bad for the stranger in his crumpled dignity in his crumpled suit, fumbling for his crumpled cigarette packet and offering one to him and Cat. Lister gestured he wanted one and Cat kindly lit it for him.

The nicotine perked him up. ‘No I mean, what are you doing *here* specifically...’

‘Well, amongst coaxing your cat-like campadre...’ he said smoulderingly - there was something so camp villainy about him, but finished off with a sweet smile and twinkling eyes that let you in on the joke in a way you couldn’t refuse ‘...trying to recover Agent Burchill.’

He was posh in an old-fashioned, authoritative way... an odd charm, by turns self-effacingly English and bullishly confident, like Lister’s Confidence, the solid hallucination from when he was ill back in the day, when he still had his Arn and his Arm, in the old school decontaminated grey quarters. Like a mix between American and English.

Lister looked astonished. ‘Yeah, we met her, a few times maybe...’

‘A few times, maybe? I thought you said you were the last human alive? Yet you knew about Burchill?’ Damn, he was sharp. Sharp and hot.

‘I... forgot,’ said Lister, feeling like he’d done something wrong, when in fact he was so severely space crazy he couldn’t keep track of what was a dream. That’s what all the post it notes and diagrams by the dream recorder were about. That and the cigarette ends, tear stains, cum stains and crumpled Leopard Lager cans. They were about that too. Maybe these nanos could nano his nogin or something while they were at it.

‘Very well. We all know what they say about deep space travel...’

‘What’s that?’ said Lister, concerned.

‘I don’t know only you, me and Agent Burchill have done it.’

‘I thought you said ‘we all know’...’

‘Must be the deep space travel,’ he said cheekily and necked the remainder of his Scotch.

The stranger offered them a bottle and Cat passed it to Lister who gratefully took a glug. ‘What’s your name?’

‘So sorry, Christopher Hitchens...’

‘Nice to meet, you’re the second Kris around here actually...’

‘My name is Christopher Hitchens...’ the stranger repeated with theatrical laboriousness. ‘You are Mr Lister and Mr Cat I gather.’

‘Gather, how?’ asked Lister.

‘It’s all in the mission briefing...’

‘The what??’

‘Just kidding. I’ve been listening to your conversation.’ He was too seductive for them to recap that they’d never actually called each other by name this whole time. ‘I’ve been rather enjoying it actually, especially the folk etymological interpretation of horoscopes deriving from ‘scopes’ and ‘Tom-horo’...’ Cat looked proud to be held in esteem by this August manly man who made him think of a kind of Rimmer guy except nice.

‘Really not feeling the ‘tom-horo’ thing,’ said Lister, slyly drawing on his smoke.

‘Anyway, before I was, rather knocked off course I was just going to ask Mr Cat: when you say that you believe in the 8 reincarnations and a vat of banana yoghurt when you die, when you say that ‘in a way’ you believe in it, it’s important for our research team to understand what you mean by this ‘in a way’ – in what kind of a way do you mean?’

‘I guess I would have to say...’ began Cat thoughtfully ‘In a kind of not at all way.’

‘A kind of not at all way? Great! So you wouldn’t be tempted to start any holy gigawars based on these beliefs... about yoghurt...’ he said disparagingly ‘that any time-travelling intergalactic security agencies might need to know about.’

‘No, sir. But I know someone who would...’

‘Who?’

‘Julie Burchill.’ Julie Burchill was a British journalist from the 1990s who’s been sent into space using secret early Stasis Booth and Skutter technology. She’d met and lived amongst and identified with the Cat people to a really extreme degree, like beyond what most Cat people did, a bit like how Rachael Dolezal identifies as black for example. She didn’t take their plight lightly. She could be a massive security risk. Lister thought the whole thing was a dream. He was retreating.

The bottle came round again and Lister took another sup. It was nice, hanging in the buggy, three men again, was Kryten a man? Kochanski wouldn’t credit him as being a man. That she had high expectations of men was flattering – he was identical to her Dave up to a point. A certain point in time. A decision was made. He hoped Kochanski was okay out there. When Cat returned saying the readings said it was Red Dwarf, it turned out he was just reading the branded label on the new screen they were using. Kris had to go out there and do it all again.

‘Who’s Chris, then?’

‘Kristine Kochanski. She’s from another dimension...’

‘Wow, sounds like quite the catch...’ said Christopher smarmily. Cat liked the metaphor. Lister felt cloistered by a cloche of closure as the storm lulled around them. Things were rounding out. Another whiskey was fitting. Each time the bottle came via Cat, but Cat wasn’t a hard drinker, he passed to Lister, who was starting to feel it. Things happened in sixes was his theory. Like this time it was colluding in the assassination of JFK, Rimmer replacing Ace, Kochanski appearing from another dimension, meeting Kryten’s brother, that weird time it snowed and it turned out to be TV snow so they could climb into the TV and explore TV worlds, and now this, the thing of him losing his arm from a virus and it hopefully being rebuilt by nanobots. At least that’s how he hoped it would end. Lister was glass half full guy, or should that be a bottle a fifth full, which was enough for him to pass out.

Lister flew into the cosmos of his broken mind and dreamt he was talking to Julie Burchill. She was kind of floating and wearing this weird pink outfit and everything was sparkly and out of focus and she was saying ‘Don’t turn away from love!’ but Lister was a soft romantic and had no intention of turning away from love, never missed a warm embrace, and was trying to convince Burchill: ‘But I found out who I was in love with only when it was too late! His departure was what spurred my heart to loving him. Sword fighting him – stop laughing, I mean literally sword fighting, disguised as a knight – watching the determination of that face as he tried to slay me with all the coordination of a newly born calf, tried to kill me. It was a peak experience. I realised then that I loved him all along. That all the fighting was just a way of rousing his emotions, his passion, maybe I was the one keeping Rimmer sane in a way even.’

cCO

Kryten, like Lister’s old Geography teacher, was sexually turned on by machines, but on at least one occasion, Kryten had had the experience of being attracted to a human man. That one occasion was Ace Rimmer, a superhuman human man with just this chest and shoulders and stuff that made Kryten feel all breathless and coy. The ‘at least’ was now, in the presence of Christopher Hitchens, sauntering in with his cigarette and whiskey just the way he liked them. 

Kryten was shocked but also instantly strangely enchanted by the pungency of the whisky and the foppishness of the hair-do which he arrogantly tossed back as he said ‘Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you...’ They shook hands and he continued ‘My name’s Christopher Hitchens, pleased to meet you.’

‘My name’s Kryten 2X4B 523P.’

‘Excellent, so you’re a robot?’ 

‘Yes, that’s right...’

‘I’m very pleased to meet you dear boy, I’ve come a long way, a long, long way, I am one space-lagged mother-fucker I can tell you... to meet someone like you: a robot from the future. Our dream...’ he said dramatically, but somehow sounding tired and frustrated at the same time ’was to travel to a posthuman era when technology reaches a singularity and humans become God-like, purely rational beings, no longer hemmed in by superstition and our tawdry organic forms.’

‘May I ask, are you human?’ asked Kryten 

‘Certainly, I mean, I certainly am... what does your gizmo tell you?’ He was referring to the psi-scan in Kryten’s huge corrugated hand.

‘Actually it says you’re a robot yet empirically you’re clearly as human as Mr Lister or Miss Kochanski...’

‘Haven’t you got the thing pointing the wrong way?’

‘Oh dear, yes, silly me,’ mumbled Kryten cantankerously turning it around. ‘Yes, you’re a human.’

‘I know!’

‘Listen, we have a human crewman aboard who is the last human alive from this dimension. For some reason this distinction is crucial to the functioning of his space-baked ego and I simply can’t let you meet....’

‘I see, well actually. Are you a drinking man, Kryten, can I call you Kryten? I’m a man of letters, Kryten,’ he continued, acknowledging his assent ‘and I suppose you are a man of numbers?’

Kryten waved his hand demurely. ‘Well I was really designed for cleaning but I have some additional abilities I suppose.’

‘You’re modest I’m sure,’ Hitchens practically roared as he started to really get stuck into the whisky.

‘No, no, sir, I’m not programmed to be modest. I really am as crap as I say I am.’

‘Well, let’s see, let’s take an evidence based approach... Can you tell me this, Kryten: What do you know about Kristine Kochanski?’ 

Kryten’s issues chip went into overdrive. He couldn’t resist bitching ‘she tells terrible jokes’. Kryten suddenly seemed like a mean, sullen little boy to Hitchens now, he couldn’t understand why a superior rational being unencumbered with our human hang ups could be so bitter and nasty. But Hitchens had yet to delve into the nature of robots and automated devices – which he would learn, all have a kind of a seed of a human personality in there. In Kryten’s case it was this smeghead fiancé of his inventor. And this inventor had issues. But on top of that Kryten had developed all kinds of exotic neuroses of his own. On top of which he had erased all his files relating to women for no sensible reason. 

‘Kryten, women are the fairer sex, they’re not supposed to be funny,’ said Hitchens.

‘Go on,’ implored Kryten. And so Christopher began schooling Kryten in his vision of the battle of the sexes, trying to help his mechanical friend assimilate better with human society. In fact as he began to drunkenly expound on his position he completely forgot the original question he meant to ask Kryten. 

One night, Hitchens had been sat at one of his favourite Washington bars, enjoying a Scotch and watching the OJ trial live on a TV in the rafters. He was approached by two men in futuristic looking bodysuits that you would have had to go to the gym at least a few times a week to wear, who explained they wanted him for his Atheism. They were a secret security operation and wanted to see how religious conflict would play out in an accelerated transhuman society. Hitchens gladly accepted the mission. It was that or have his memory erased. Which he was now busily doing with alcohol. 

More of a sophisticate than Lister, Hitchens could handle his drink ordinarily, but these weren’t ordinary times. His mind fogged with spacetime-lag, his body weather-beaten by the planetoid, he fell into a drunken dream. He was back in DC, a sweltering day. Melting him down onto the sidewalk. Outside the bar, his favourite bar, people heckling OJ, trucks going by, lifting his sweat-patched untucked blue shirt with a scuzzy breeze. The street musicians beat the hells bells out of the huge ad-hoc trash percussion structures they had erected. Politicians and paranoids pushed him hither and thither as he swayed in the heat, wiping his brow and looking up at a hoarding reading in large friendly letters: What do you think happens to you when you die?

cCO

‘You as well? When Cats die, they are reincarnated 8 times before they go to heaven where they meet 70 Virgos in a pool of banana yoghurt.’

‘Why Virgos?’

‘Virgos is a starsign dummy.’ Cat was far more involved with the string he was jiggling.

‘I know that,’ said Kochanski laughing ‘but why Virgos?’

‘Virgos tend to loose their virginities late.’

‘Right. And the banana yoghurt?’

‘You really need to ask? Look, if you’re so smart, what flavour yoghurt do you think the Virgos should be in? Strawberry? Are you nuts?’ Kochanski laughed, then suddenly went serious.

‘How come you’re the smartest guy around and no-one’s noticed?’ Cat was entranced by his string, which he had complete control over even if he appeared to be simply jiggling it around. Kochanski sighed. ‘You were right about Dave, he’s not homophobic exactly, it’s more complicated than that, but he’d always liked men anyway, he’s bisexual...’

‘He’s biwhat? What is it with you apes and your labels. Cats don’t need categories, cats are individuals, each cat a law unto themselves...’

‘That’s what we’re trying to do, with these labels, to work towards that – but some sections of society are more individualistic than others... Cat?’ Growing irritated she grabbed Cat’s hand holding the string and pushed it down, coming to rest on his thigh. ‘You’re not like my Cat.’

‘I’m not your Cat. Why would I be your Cat? All we share is a 3 million year common ancestor.’ Kochanski looked at Cat properly for the first time. There was no reason to think that he was even the same species it suddenly occurred to her. If you wound the evolutionary clock backwards and started again, things always turned out different - evolution was pure contingency. 

She became aware of the soft velvet of Cat’s expanding bulge against her hand resting delicately in his crotch and they both instantly swivelled around to face each other, staring burningly into each others eyes before their lips drew together magnetically, bumping softly, before moistening and linking, as Kochanski extended her tongue between his fangs and Cat nestled his fingers in the small of the back of her head.

He nuzzled her nape, greedily purring and drinking in her smell and she felt the strange feline facial hair structure tickle her. She could feel the unique articulations of his six pac and six pecs under ruffled silk.

‘W-wait. This isn’t right... Lister!’

‘Cat, we’ve worked things out, he’s in love with Rimmer now.’ What was the point, he’d already killed the moment. She wrapped herself in one of the ship issue arctic bomber jackets they brought.

‘I’m sorry Officer BB, but it can’t happen. There was this time back in the old days. Before we lost the Dwarf. We were attacked by a polymorph – they can turn into anything to draw out emotions which they feed on. So Lister got scared and the thing sucked out his fear. Then it turned into Rimmer’s Mum and Lister had sex with it and Rimmer got so angry, the thing sucked out his anger.’

‘So you don’t want to get together because I’m your best friend’s mum?’

‘Plus I’m a Virgo.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t need another 69 of you to get to heaven.’

Cat laughed and Kochanski looked surprised. Before now she’d only made mean jokes about Cat. 

‘Now I don’t have to ask about the banana yoghurt.’ Cat laughed again, this was easy. ‘C’mon, let’s get back to the Bug,’ she said starting the ignition. ‘Kryten?’ He flicked gormlessly onto the vidscreen. ‘We’re coming in. Get the ramp ready, please...’

‘Certainly, and may I just say, you look lovely.’ Kochanski’s hair and make-up were perturbed by her interspecies make-out session, and her bomber jacket, done up to the top was boxy and unflattering.

‘I look... Sure, just get the ramp ready, will you?’ But he was offline, already working on the ramp they presumed. ‘What’s got into him – he’s never complimented me before? All I had to do was drag myself backwards through a dust-storm and he’s suddenly “You look lovely, ma’am”.’

‘That’s a good impression!’ said Cat snickering.

‘Kryten? Am I funny?’ asked Kochanski.

‘I told you you look lovely, you don’t need to even bother being funny,’ said Kryten, crackling onto the vidscreen. ‘That’s what men do to try and seduce you...’ At first Kochanski was just like what the actual smeg, but then it hit her, all the smeg he’d put them through – the endless meddling with their lives, the jealousy and childishness, the jokes about women working in Oxfam shops – and she just boiled over. ‘Kryten, when we get back, I’m going to need an extra large bottle of salad cream.’

‘Now, now, dear there’s no need for that...’

‘Kryten, you dopey gimboid, just lower the ramp, okay?’

‘Not until you name five women that are funny.’

‘What?’ said Kochanski.

‘He’s gone insane in the membrane,’ said Cat in his lower register.

‘Let me get this straight, you’re only going to lower the ramp if we can think of 5 funny women?’ Her look said are you quite sure, but he seemed sincere – they would have to call his bluff. ‘Okay well that’s easy, there’s...’ And then her mind went blank the way minds do when they try and think of something.

‘The drummer from Def-Leopard!’ said Cat suddenly.

‘That’s famous one armed people, sir. The game we were playing earlier?’ Cat looked narked.

‘Kristine Kochanski!’ he tried again.

‘Not funny,’ said Kryten, who seemed possessed by a weird sexist force. ‘Charming, intelligent, beautiful even. But not funny, no.’

‘Kryten can you stop trolling us for a second and let us back in the bug. There’s a storm raging out there!’ said Kochanski.

‘Got it!’ said Lister, suddenly appearing from the back seat where Cat had put him when he blacked out. ‘The Golden Girls.’ Recently, in a rare instance of them all getting along, they had ended up watching The Golden Girls together and all agreed they were all really funny, especially the little angry one.

‘Ha! In your geometric marshmallow face!’ said Cat.

‘But wait,’ said Kryten, evilly ‘there were only four Golden Girls.’

‘Kryten?’ 

‘Yes, Ma’am?’

‘Remember when we were in the ducts and I said something so funny it would make you sick?’ Kryten had indeed said this, about he information that Kochanski made a sound like a rusty gate when making love.

The drawbridge came down and Kryten let them back in.

‘I always liked that show, y’know, The Golden Girls,’ said Lister from the back seat. ‘I like those shows where everything goes back to normal at the end of each episode. Life’s like that. I’ve got this feeling there’ll be no weird smeg for a while now. Like we’re reaching the end of an arc or somesmeg.’


End file.
